


all in your arms

by endquestionmark



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 09:59:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3973858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not that the words are slow to return to him; it’s just that there are so many more concise ways for Max to communicate his fury, his hunger, his pain and rage. There are so many meanings encapsulated in a snarl, the set of his shoulders, and, right now, the cant of his hips, provocation and pleading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all in your arms

**Author's Note:**

> Credit and blame to: [Nell](http://cthonical.tumblr.com/) for instigating this to begin with, [Rachel](http://soaringrachel.tumblr.com/) for the opening scene, and [Cat](http://swanjolras.tumblr.com/) for being utterly aghast at every part of this and visiting me in various cafés solely to shout at me about it. I hope you're all happy because I am personally horrified. (ETA: Dubious omega-hormonal consent issues in the first scene; read accordingly.)

It’s not that the words are slow to return to him; it’s just that there are so many more concise ways for Max to communicate his fury, his hunger, his pain and rage. There are so many meanings encapsulated in a snarl, the set of his shoulders, and, right now, the cant of his hips, provocation and pleading. Warboys, too sick to care and running on empty, had dragged him from his cage, gag still between his teeth, and he had snarled at them too, spitting his anger from between clenched teeth, and now he’s here. This room is cut deep into the rock of Citadel’s central mesa, among the storerooms cooled by the well-fresh water in the reservoirs surrounding them. The only light is from chemical lamps in brackets below the low ceiling, glowing nauseated green, and it would be quiet — no hiss of welding, or roar of engines, not with this much rock and water around them — if not for the sound of breathing.

It blurs together in the silence, swells and hushes like the sighing of the wind over the dunes. Someone uncuffs his hands, and the door slams behind Max — chains, more of them, clattering and echoing rust-red — and he tracks the sound back and forth, head whipping around, but most of all he hears his own pulse, echoing in his ears. There it is, what the warboys must have picked up on. He’s running hot, even with the rock leaching warmth from his shoulders, and he feels it radiating from his skin. When he fumbles with the knot of the gag, there are other hands, suddenly, pulling at the cloth, running over his arms and up to his shoulders, and though he’s learned to flinch away from being touched, he leans into this by instinct that he would, at any other time, suppress.

This isn’t a fight, though, and it isn’t the road, and right now he isn’t a road warrior — he hasn’t been one for a long time, regardless — but the desperation remains, and, more than that, the neediness. There’s slick on his thighs, leaking out of him and soaking through his trousers; he’s a liability, a distraction and a beacon to any alpha for klicks around, and there are enough of them for that to be a significant problem. Immortan Joe keeps his stranglehold on power by controlling their water supply, and even the most headstrong of alphas isn’t likely to start a war over that, not when the last water wars wiped the landscape blank and crystalline with salt. Alpha instinct is a hell of a thing, though, and a dispute over rights to an omega could result in enough casualties to upset the uneasy balance of life at Citadel.

Instead, there are these rooms, or so the warboys complain: the best rooms, kept for breeders and bloodbags with a surfeit of bloodlust. Deep enough in the rock to cut the noise, and surrounded by enough water to mute their scent, this is where Joe has omegas in heat kept, leaves them to rut until they’re spent, cooled down for another month or two. Right now, even though Max doesn’t have the words — can’t think of them, can’t put them together — to say it, that’s all he wants: hands on his arms and weight on his chest, pinning him down; he wants teeth in his throat and fingernails in his hips, urgent and desperate.

Max always remembers heats like a dream, though he hasn’t indulged one for a long time; usually he picks a direction and floors the gas, drives until he doesn’t recognize the stars or the shifting dunes. Then it’s a blur of need and wanting, alone in the sand, until he wakes up sore, bruises and sprains that he doesn’t remember sustaining, tire tracks long since covered over, like waking from one dream into another. This time is no different. He can’t track faces or bodies, loses clothing without noticing, can’t tell who’s holding his wrists above his head and who’s licking up his thighs, smearing wet everywhere. Pain blooms under his jaw — a bite? fingernails? he can’t tell — and he arches into it, baring his throat and shoving his hips forward.

He comes for the first time just like that, cock untouched, overwhelmed by sensation and crying for more, and finally someone presses into him, two fingers, and he’s so wet that all he feels is pressure, barely any stretch. There’s no need to ask for more, not when everyone here knows what Max needs so desperately, and he’s gasping for it when, finally, someone fucks into him properly, sliding in with barely any effort. It’s sloppy and desperate and so good, being filled and fucked the way he wants, and it’s still not what he _needs_ , is the thing.

Max can smell them, strangers still, but as familiar as oil and exhaust, and not intoxicating at all. He wants burning rubber and ozone, overwhelming and irresistible, and he won’t find that here. He’s shoving back on every stroke, pushing for more and harder and better, and there’s a hand around his throat, pressing down on the bruise from the needle in his vein, and it’s still not what he needs — won’t satisfy those bone-deep bred instincts — but it’s enough, and he arches, scrabbles for purchase, so close. The second time he comes, he shakes through it, knees slipping on the rough stone, and when he flinches away, oversensitive but still wanting, they let him go.

He doesn’t want them to let him go — he wants the hands back, wants them soft on his face, in his hair, wants to be coaxed into a third time, and then soothed to sleep until he wakes to the roar of blood in his ears again — but, again, words escape him, and they wouldn’t do any good anyway. There are alphas in Citadel, but they’re muted by the smoke and the rotten blood and the relentless, inescapable heat, and they aren’t here to use Max the way he needs it, beyond articulation and beyond anything but the overwhelming hollow ache in his chest.

Max curls up, exhausted but unsatisfied, and, despite the embers rekindling in his spine, tries his best to sink into some sort of fragmented sleep.

///

Two weeks later, then, and the cages in the warboys’ fuel chambers are shaking with the roar of engines outside. Warboys are disposable, and therefore not given the luxury of chambers where they can sleep well. They burn out quickly and explosively, do Joe’s boys, with their short half-lives and tendency to martyrdom; no need to make their lives any more pleasant than necessary, not when they’re so hungry for the infinite roads that they are convinced will come afterwards. It’s a bleeding day, so Max will be here for a few hours, upside-down with his shiny new muzzle — he put a fresh gash in Slit’s cheek the week previous, staples still chrome — while Nux babbles about the octane of his blood, and the things that he saw in his night-fever dreams, and how they’ll witness him, they all will.

Blood loss is a hell of a thing. Two weeks is a long time, too, even with bleeding and resting days, so Max isn’t really sure of what’s going on, besides that he’s angry about it; that’s not so much a surprise, though, as a fact of life. There are voices, talking about Joe’s breeders and an Imperator gone rogue, but this is not surprising either. There are other voices, asking Max why he failed to save them, and what he’s going to do to avenge them, and _who killed the world_? Max doesn’t remember whether he heard that last one in the last two weeks, or in the last two decades; whether it was from a human or from the endless lashing of the wind. Then, though, he’s being swung down from the cage, and his ankles are unshackled. There are corridors of stone, and stumbling from the lithic gloom into the daylight, so bright that it feels like hooks in the backs of his eyes.

Nux, Max has gathered, has more of an active death wish than the average warboy. He’s coming to the end of his half-life, and there’s only so much that Max’s blood can do for him. He isn’t going to live forever, even if Nux finds some way to strip out his failing organs, irradiated by endless sun and too much nudging, and make himself chrome all the way through. Fresh blood, no matter the octane, only adds a tentative week to a warboy’s tenuous lease on life — not long enough for omega blood to have any effect — and Nux is counting in days now, not weeks.

He isn’t happy, then, when Nux decides to crucify him on his own car as the world’s least dignified hood ornament; he’s even less happy when the scavengers engage them, because he’s not looking to die like this. Max doesn’t believe that there’s anything afterwards, because if there was then surely somebody would have come back for him. He doesn’t believe in the glory of going out in a fireball of guzzoline and scrap, or striking out across the salt for greener land. Across the salt, there is just more salt, and more sand, and he’s seen enough people die to know that, in the end, they all fight for that extra breath, and for that stolen second. Max has spent his entire life clawing his way up from that darkness and he doesn’t intend to wager everything on a fight that he’s never seen anyone win.

Nux is screaming when he catches her scent. Nux has been screaming for approximately ten minutes, or a small eternity by Max’s reckoning. Max catches her scent — soot, and oil, and all the hundred things that he’s used to, from the road and his own hands — but then it hits him: metal, like biting down on foil, and the stinging acidity of battery terminals, or is it blood, coppery in his mouth. It’s lightning, incandescent and all-encompassing, or so he thinks, and then, a moment later, he catches her eye and has to reconsider. _She’s_ lightning. Two weeks out, and two weeks to go until his next heat, probably, strapped to the front of a car driven by a dead man walking, and suddenly all he can hear is the rush of blood in his ears, and he can’t look away — and she _does_ , though, eyes back on the road, as they swerve — and it persists even when logically, it shouldn’t. All he should be able to hear is the screaming of the storm, and, briefly, of Nux, again, but his pulse is hammering in his skull — or is it hers? — and then she jerks the wheel, and he feels her resolve, tempered steel, and metal tearing, and then, at last, blessed silence.

On waking, it isn’t the sound of the war rig’s engines sputtering to life which he follows, but that same lightning, and the taste of her blood (it must be hers, laced as it is with oil and sparks) in his mouth. Max tries to wash it out with fresh water, from the rig’s supply tank, and then with powder and smoke, and he’s straddling her, gun barrel to the back of her head — and she had done the same thing, gun pressed into the hinge of his jaw, under the bone, and she had pulled the trigger — and he can’t do it. Three shots around her head, and she’s facedown in the sand, and he could no more kill her than he could himself. It’s partly animal instinct — living is a difficult habit to break, when it’s such an effort in the first place, and he’s inclined to flight rather than fight regardless — but stronger than that is the gravity she exerts over him, and he runs.

Running turns out to be more of an enterprise than he figured it for. “What do I call you?” she says — not her first words to him, but the first ones he recalls — and he looks at her like an animal, wide-eyed and distrustful and backed into a corner. “Fool!” she screams, and it doesn’t matter how bone-deep terrified he is of this, of his life in her hands and her grip on his spine, because that’s Furiosa, and it doesn’t matter what name she calls him by. He floors the gas, and races the lightning, and — heels. Her foot braced on the dashboard, and Max loads the gun and passes it to her before she even asks; two perfect shots, and she barely shifts, and the rig swings around her, and he falls into stride.

He is not lying to her when Angharad loses her grip. He could, if he tried. He could lie to her if he lied also to himself, first, and believed it, and Max could do that, if he needed to. The trick is, perhaps, that he doesn’t want to, right now. He tells her the truth, no more and no less, and he can’t tell if she hears his pulse the way he does hers, falling into a beat disparate from that of the tiger drummers. The sun goes down, and she puts a gun to his head for the third time — the first, harsh, like a bite; the second, her body pressed against his from shoulders to hips, feet braced in the shifting sand, and it had only been reflexes which had saved him — but this time he sees the blur of the barrel out of the corner of his eye, and goes still, right where she needs him.

“Don’t breathe,” she says.

He doesn’t. He almost forgets to start again, when the ringing in his ears dies down and the weight on his shoulder is just a sense-memory, and when they’re on firm ground — which Max has been all along — he walks away, because that’s what he does, and because he feels like tugging at the leash a little and seeing if she lets him go.

She doesn’t. She doesn’t let him go then, and she doesn’t let him go when he tumbles off the engine, and when they ride back into Citadel, it’s his turn to take her by the elbow, and help her find her feet.

It goes both ways, though, and she wraps her arm around him, at the small of his back, when they lift the platform, with Toast and Cheedo and Capable and the Wretched that they’ve lifted up, and she looks at him through her good eye, blood crusted on her face and chest rising and falling, blessed and silent and rhythm with him. He knows, then, that he’s not the only one who sees the lightning, though she probably doesn’t think of it in those terms — maybe to her he’s the smooth firing of clean spark plugs, or the rhythm of wheels on packed dust — and now, in the sudden silence after the storm, the ozone is clearer then ever, and they’re off-road again.

Off-road means learning to live around each other, in the limited space of the mesas, and it means that suddenly there’s a lot less to distract them, even on the sudden shifting surface that is Citadel’s power reshuffle. Only Corpus Colossus remains, of Immortan Joe’s sons; he has a healthy instinct for survival, and decides not to press the issue. “No killing,” Cheedo says. “Not even him.”

Cheedo is kind, and gentle, but perhaps not good. Max thinks that if she were convinced of her goodness, of the rightness of her cause, she would not hesitate to drop Colossus from the highest point of the tallest mesa. He rubs his hand over the back of his neck, starting to prickle in the sun, and catches Furiosa watching. Furiosa is good, to her core; for Furiosa, Max will wait out the week before he takes off, steals some stripped-down pursuit vehicle from the remaining fleet and strikes out in a straight line in the small hours of the morning, when it’s still cool enough to really push the engine. (If he doesn’t ask permission, he won’t need to beg forgiveness. She won’t be able to ask him to stay.) Furiosa would, for these women, do the good thing, and the right thing, and wipe Joe’s line out like footsteps in the sand; she would do it so that they wouldn’t have to, but she does not do it because they do not wish it.

A week ago, Max would not have understood the mechanics of such a decision, let alone the sentiment. A week is a long time in a dead world. Now, he reflexively calms when Furiosa enters the room, and stands behind her as a matter of course, though she doesn’t need him to; her presence carries enough weight alone that he feels excessive, and shifts his weight, in continuous motion, in reflection of that. “Stop that,” she says, once. It’s not an order, simply a statement, but he does anyway, shoulders going back and back straightening, and the milking mothers exchange knowing looks, and Furiosa shifts a little, making room for him, and his mind goes blessedly quiet.

Max counts days, and takes stock: here is food, there is fuel, there are spare tools and water to last the day’s drive to the Bullet Farm, and a week afterwards. There is always war to be had, and tasks to be done that are too dangerous or questionable to be given to any but the most foolhardy. Peace does not mesh with the voices of the accusing dead, and the fire behind his eyelids, and the endless, endless bones in his dreams, crushed beneath wheels and scattered to the wind. At any moment, a wheel will blow and Max will careen out of control, and this tenuous bartered peace will be broken, and he doesn’t want that, not just for Furiosa but for himself. Angharad died for this, as did the Vuvalini, and Max can’t bring them back — might not be brave enough to do it, even if he could — but he can take himself out of the world they gave themselves for, which is one where road warriors are more a liability than an asset.

On the fourth day, he becomes aware of his pulse again. He has the words for this now, but doesn’t want to use them; using them makes this real, this physical trust and, once again, ozone in the air, and if this isn’t real, then there is nothing stopping him from counting three more sunrises and striking out on his own. He isn’t seeking redemption — he never has been — but quiet; quiet is something that he could live with.

Before the sun comes up on the fifth day, earlier now, though the seasons no longer shift, Max stumbles from his pallet, heartbeat echoing, and watches the dawn from a post outside Furiosa’s chambers. He’s barely there ten minutes when she opens the door, legs long and bare, unselfconscious in her loose shirt and bare feet. “Steam,” she says. “You smell of radiator steam. Did you know that?”

“No,” he says, and shakes his head. He’s still not sure of his words, and whether they mean what he wants them to. “No. I didn’t. I did not know that.”

“Come here,” she says, and she isn’t smiling, not the way she did when the Vuvalini saluted her mother, the way she must have done when she was a child in the green place, but there’s an openness to her face not couched in her usual determination. She holds out her hand — flesh, not metal; her left arm is bare — like someone gentling a spooked animal, and leads him step by step, and though their hands never touch, he follows. Furiosa closes the door behind him, muffling its click, and stands for just a moment, looking at him in the half-light. There is cloth over the open window, white like the garments of the wives, and it flutters; Max glances at it, distracted, and so when Furiosa reaches out to touch his face, he flinches back, eyes going reflexively wide.

She doesn’t say anything, but tilts her head, waiting, and he lets out the breath he’s been holding and, with what feels like a monumental effort, closes his eyes, tension coiling malevolent in his chest and shoulders. Max _wants_ , so badly, but a week is both an eternity and no time at all, and he has a lot to remember how to forget; her hand on his cheek, then, help wipe that away, and she strokes under his jaw with one fingertip until Max is no longer holding himself still through force of effort, but simply being, and letting her touch him.

“Thank you,” Furiosa says, and he blinks to see her eyes wide and full of wonder, and a different smile — not nostalgic this time, but something more effervescent — joyous, and his chest aches at the sight. She traces down his neck, and he bares his throat, this time not desperate but indulgent, though no less needy. If she stops touching him, Max thinks that his heart may stop. When she pulls at the collar of his shirt, he has to fight to keep his eyes open, and she smooths her palm over his shoulder, down his arm, casually possessive, and his knees go weak. Furiosa, for an Imperator, is the most restrained alpha Max can remember. She carries her authority like a second skin, ready to turn over at any moment, rather than exerting it in flares; she moves with purpose and force, and sets objects in motion by the sheer fact of her existence. It sets his pulse racing, and when she pushes at his shoulders, finally, he goes to his knees gratefully. Her undivided attention is a heavy weight to bear.

She kneels to straddle him, then, a little off-balance, and he reaches up before he can help himself, pausing a second before his hands come to rest on her hips. “Go on,” Furiosa says, and he lets them settle, marveling at her solidity, her warmth. “Help me with this,” she says, taking her shirt by the collar at the back of her neck, and tugging it over her head. Underneath, her skin is bare and sleep-warm and sheened faintly with sweat. Max reaches out again, fingers darting over her shoulders, and she laughs, takes his hand and interlaces their fingers. “Really,” she says. “Go on.”

He traces the curve of her breasts then, cupping their weight in his hands; she arches her back, pushing forward, and he can feel his calluses catching on her skin, rough and ragged, and she rests her arm on his shoulder and sighs. With the motion, she pushes her hips into his, and he nearly chokes, because he’s — hard, unexpectedly, though it shouldn’t be, though it’s the most natural thing in the world, right now, for him to jerk up to meet her — sensitive, and overwhelmed by the smell of her, filling the room like the roar of the desert, and he can’t — he can’t think—

“Here,” Furiosa says, her hand on his face again, and she takes his hand in hers, brings it up to touch her face. Last time he did this, he was gifting her his name, like the sun that the warboys seek so desperately to hold; he would have given her far more to see her take that first whisper of a breath again, but that was all he had, and his blood besides. Now, she is no longer cold, and her cheeks are wind-burnt and raw, but he traces down her jaw as if she is softer than water, than the synthetic silk of the curtain, and infinitely more precious than either, though thousands have died for less.

Naked, she is no less authoritative than she is at the wheel of a war rig, and she undoes his trousers, shoves them down and scrapes her nails through the trail of hair on his stomach, and he notices, then, the scar on her stomach, low on the curve of her belly, horizontal and raised. He hums a question at her, and she smiles again, a little bitter this time, though like the scar itself it is an old bitterness, and an ache mostly faded. “Not a kind world for children,” she says. “I didn’t expect to live until a day that I would want my daughter to see.”

There are things that Max cannot begin to comprehend, and then there are things he can — even in dead weight, a child is so light, and so loose-limbed — and he thinks, briefly, of the war pups, and the Dag’s belly, not yet showing, and the Many Mothers, whose only children now will be the green that Furiosa fights so devotedly to protect, even as an abstract dream of the future. “There’s more than one way,” he says, and her hand stills at his waist. She traces circles into his skin, doesn’t meet his eyes, and he clarifies. “To be a mother,” he says. “To a better world.” His pulse is still loud, but muted, and hers is overwhelmingly slow. He wants, suddenly, nothing more than to make her gasp, and to take joy in her pleasure. “If you want.”

Furiosa meets his gaze squarely, then, and presses her hand over his heart. “I want,” she says, and traces down his chest, nails raising welts, and doesn’t bother to finish, rising up on her knees, a smooth surge of motion, before she lines herself up, grip firm, and pushes down. She’s resolute, and doesn’t need to say it aloud: what she wants, she will go to the ends of the world to find, whether that’s the smallest seed of hope, ready to take root in the willing heart, or a glimmer of redemption, a rumor two decades old and lost in the dunes, and right now what — who — she wants is him, here and now, and he gives himself over to her entirely.

She wraps her legs around his waist, and her arm around his neck, and grinds down hard, sighing with her chin tucked over his shoulder; Max splays a hand over the small of her back, marveling at the arch of her spine, the rise and fall of her chest, and gets his other hand between them, where she’s so wet, and she shakes against him when he traces the stretch of her, thumbs firm and steady over her clit. That’s good — that makes the electricity, the way he can almost feel it on his skin, coming off of her like static, stronger — and he does it again, until she’s gasping, breathy round vowels.

When Furiosa wraps her hand around the back of his neck, trusting him to hold her up, he can’t help growling, the sound breaking free from his chest, and from then it’s all impact, the rhythm of her hips and the scrape of her nails and the sound of her breath. Max needs — not for himself, but for her, but for himself through her, but — more than he can describe, and more than words ever could anyway, and he presses, with his fingers and his hips, and presses his mouth behind her ear.

When she gasps his name, he knows that there is no way he’d rather be called, and she digs her fingers into the nape of his neck, hand tucked under his shirt, and jerks against him, pushing against his hand hard and fast, until he can feel her heartbeat through her chest, skin to skin. He feels the way she goes so still for a long moment before she gasps deep, and then she surges against him again and again — “Come on, come _on_ ,” she bites out, and _oh_ , those are her nails, and _oh_ — and he loses himself in her, in the storm of her pulse and her scent, and shakes apart, holding her as if he could somehow get closer.

Things begin to blur, after that; there are his clothes, discarded, and a cloth, and Furiosa’s hands, as capable of gentleness as they are of bruising, and her smile against his forehead as she pulls him to the pallet and helps him arrange himself. The window is still open, and even the hot breeze of the sunrise is cool enough to make him shiver; Furiosa smooths her hand down his back, stroking her thumb down the divot at the base of his spine, and then pressing in. Max arches into it, and turns his head to seek her out, still dizzy with the smell of her, heady and human, and she gives him that crooked smile, and says: “There’s a rig for you.”

Spent as he is, for the moment, he feels the words like an echoing blow, and she runs her hand up his back, over the raised ridges of the tattoo now bared. “No sense turning a pursuit vehicle into a transport,” Furiosa says, a little sad, maybe. She’s a war rig, same as him, with the possibility of change shimmering on the horizon. They are both flinging themselves after it as quickly as it can disappear over the curve of the world, a mirage with the possibility of deliverance if they drive hard and fast enough, through the day and the night, never deviating from their set course. “Breathe free, Max,” she says, and — words, slow to return, are all he has left — he meets her eyes, almost as afraid as he was when muzzled and chained.

“Home,” he says, because that’s vaster than the desert, to him, the idea that there’s anything other than the road, and the shifting dunes. “Home is freedom too.”

“Home,” Furiosa says, cupping his face in her hand, with that same sad, wondrous smile that she had given the Vuvalini, as if she’s repeating something that she had been told years ago — a speck of grit, chrome under the rust — “home doesn’t have to be a place, but—”

There are more concise ways to speak than with words, sometimes. Max lays his hand over hers, and lets that speak for him, and trusts her to understand, and, more wondrous than green; than cold water, fresh from the well; than the blink of long-dead satellites spinning dead stories in the night sky, cold and far-off: she does.

 


End file.
